


island syndrome

by spqr



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Familial Soulmates, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:01:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22776820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Tony has nineteen marks. The national average is five.
Relationships: Pepper Potts & James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 37
Kudos: 733





	island syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> came out of a dead sleep at church with my grandma and had this entire fic in my head so it may be the work of either jesus or the devil

Tony, age six, dreams about being an island.

One of those uninhabited ones way out in the pacific, bristling with palm trees and crystal clear streams and enormous conch shells and nothing else. The islands people are talking about when they ask you what book you’d take--the ones you go to if you want to disappear forever.

He doesn’t share any marks with his parents. He doesn’t share marks with anyone he recognizes, not even Jarvis, who he loves more than anyone else in the world. He checks a million times, alone in the dark under his Captain America covers, pressing his thumb to one colorful dot after the next, working his way up the winding trail of soulmarks that coat his leg like tattooed scales. He sees the little boy with black skin, the baby girl with a shock of strawberry blond hair, the tense face frozen in ice, the pimply teenager who spends his days ducking his dad’s fists and hiding in the physics section of the library.

Some of his marks only show him murky silver smoke, but he knows those ones are reserved for people who aren’t born yet--people younger than him, his own kids. He never sees his parents. And he knows, by the way his mother avoids the question when he asks, that they never see him either.

The first time he dreams about being an island, he’s tagging along on a business trip to Tokyo with Obie and his father. _Never too young to learn the ropes,_ Obie had laughed while they were boarding their jet, but all his father had said was, _You better keep your trap shut on the plane, Tony, I have to sleep_. Their hotel, when they finally get there, has a balcony, and Tony wanders out unsupervised while Obie and Howard settle in for a nightcap with a couple of waitresses from the bar downstairs.

Tony presses his nose to the glass barrier of the railing and stares out at it--the endless city. It looks like it takes up the entire world, stretching all the way to the horizon, as far as he can see, and every inch of it is packed tight with people. It’s the most people he’s ever seen at once, looking down on a busy intersection, the convergence of hundreds of pedestrians as tiny as ants moving in a flow, and Tony tries to pick out individuals and wonders how many soulmarks each of them has. If they know the people. If they share marks with their parents, or if they, like him, were doomed to unhappy childhoods before they were born.

His breath fogs up the glass of the railing.

With the opaque overlay of the fog and the lights of Tokyo beyond, the reflection of his face almost looks like another person--who, when he reaches out to touch them, disappears.

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever meet the people he’s destined to hold closest to him, or if he’ll wander through life blind and alone, aching to bump into them. There is nothing connecting him to them now, in this moment. Nothing except the intangible link of their faces in his mind, their hearts seared on his skin. He’s only six, but he’s never felt more alone.

AAA

Pepper’s mark is bright red. The color of strawberries.

She takes her time telling him that she has his mark as well--she’s worried it will be unprofessional, change things between them. When she finally shows him, pushing up the sleeve of her smart oxford button down to reveal a shiny golden mark on the inside of her wrist, letting him press his thumb to it to feel that sharp, answering zing of recognition--he assures her that if what she wants is a professional soulmate-ship, he’s perfectly happy to accomodate her.

“God, don’t be stupid,” Pepper says, and pulls him into a kiss.

She’s only the third of his marks he’s found. The day she walked into his office for an interview he nearly had a heart attack, and then nearly had another one when--after he fell all over himself to offer her the job--she didn’t call back to accept for a full week. It’s an insane feeling, one he suspects he’ll never quite get used to, no matter how many of his marks he finds, to meet someone in person for the first time and already know what their face has looked like at every stage of their life, from baby fat to ugly crying to laughing tears of joy, to feel already without even a handshake that they’re a part of you.

Rhodey was the one who spotted Tony, actually.

Tony’d been busy getting beat to a pulp outside a frat party at Harvard, accused (accurately) of trying to feel up some alpha male’s girlfriend, and Rhodey had swooped in like a fucking angel of the lord to send a veritable strike team of Bretts and Chads and Byrons running home with their tails between their legs, crying for mommy. Tony, fourteen at the time and well-used to being alone in the world, had been so drunk that he barely recognized Rhodey at all, but still somehow had ended up accepting a piggy back ride home to his off-campus apartment, where, when he finally clawed his way back into wakefulness sometime around one the next afternoon, he found Rhodey cooking eggs and hashbrowns.

There’d been yelling. Of course there had been yelling--Rhodey was a mother hen of the worst variety, and Tony had spent the better part of a decade building up a shell thick enough to withstand nuclear detonation. At his favorite hot pot restaurant one night, Tony said, “You don’t have to stick around so much, you know. I know it’s probably not very cool for you to be hanging out with some nerdy kid.”

“We’re at MIT, Tones,” Rhodey twirled ramen deftly around chopsticks, took a big bite. “Literally everyone here is some nerdy kid. Besides-- _we’re connected_.”

The last was said with a joking lilt that Tony was quick becoming accustomed to, but he didn’t laugh, because what he’d really meant to say was, _I don’t need you. I’m used to being alone. I’m good at it._ And Rhodey wasn’t getting it, clearly, but he didn’t want to say it again.

He didn’t need to. Rhodey noticed his expression, his silence. He put down his chopsticks, and in the loud, steamy fracas of the cramped dining room, he leaned close to Tony over the table--Tony fighting the urge to lean back, not used to people looking at him and really seeing him--and told him, “I’m sorry it took me so long to show up. But I’m here now. And I’m not going anywhere, so relax.”

_“Stupid,”_ Pepper murmurs into his mouth, her lips moving warm and feather-light against his tongue, and he hears Rhodey’s voice in his head. _Relax. We’re connected._

He sinks his hand in her hair and presses her body close against his, feels the carefully starched crinkle of her skirt suit and the shape of her underneath, and thinks about how she’s already a part of his body, how when Rhodey’s hand closed on the nape of his neck in the fight at that frat house he felt more at home than he had in his fourteen years of life up to that point, how Pepper’s hand sneaking down the back of his pants and her laugh against his mouth feels like what he always used to imagine it was supposed to feel like to crawl into bed at night--snug and safe and one of many.

One of many. Family members tucked in bed, rainbow marks dotted on skin, hearts reaching for each other in the dark. He and Pepper stagger back toward the cot in his lab, the gross rickety one she’s always sure to keep clean sheets on, knocking into things and laughing, and he feels together.

AAA

Rhodey’s his first, Pepper’s his third, JARVIS is his second.

He thinks he’s going crazy, the night he stumbles home from the lab at MIT and starts his nighttime ritual of pressing his thumb to each soulmark and finds a scrolling stream of ones and zeroes. This morning it was silver smoke, now it’s fucking _binary,_ and he stands there in his pajama pants with his toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and keeps his thumb pressed there, mind stuck in the code, until a foamy glop of warm toothpaste drops on his bare chest.

Tony’s never heard of anyone else having a soulmark that matches an artificial intelligence, but then again, no one’s really built anything this advanced before.

The first time he flips the switch to turn JARVIS on, he holds his breath for the whole minute the system takes to boot up, terrified that he got it wrong. That he hit one wrong key somewhere and now it’s all ruined, JARVIS will never be the revolutionary program he’s supposed to be.

Then JARVIS says, “Good morning, sir. It is currently 3:30 a.m. on the 7th of August, 1990. The temperature is 86 degrees, with 90% humidity, and the forecast for the day promises severe thunderstorms.” And Tony smiles so wide his whole face hurts.

AAA

He recognizes Bruce Banner at a conference in 2002.

Bruce has him, too. He spots Tony across the ballroom, through the forest of bad haircuts and boxy beige suits--Tony’s always the most stylish person at these things--and raises a hand to wave awkwardly. Later, when they manage to escape into a deserted side hallway, Bruce throws his arms around Tony and just holds on, which is even more awkward than his stiff little wave but so nice and open-hearted and out of left field that Tony can’t help but hug him back.

He shows Tony the mark very early one morning, apropos of nothing, while they’re standing in pale predawn light in the kitchen of the Malibu house waiting for a pot of coffee to brew--pulls his green cable knit sweater up over his hip to expose the pudgy tanned curve of his side and guides Tony’s thumb to press against a perfectly round dot the color of a fresh spring leaf.

They don’t exchange any words, but Tony returns the gesture, rolling up his pant leg to show Bruce the deep purple circle on the outside of his right knee, and when the coffee’s done they take it and head back down to the lab and nothing’s changed, really, except that everything has.

Later, he asks Bruce why he showed him so quick--only a few days after they met.

Bruce says, “The first one of my marks that I found, Betty, she recognized me in the school cafeteria and ran over and showed me all at once, before she even introduced herself. I was in--honestly, I was in a pretty bad place, with my parents, and I’d bought some pills from this kid in my gym class and I was planning on taking them in the school bathroom. If she’d waited even a few minutes to show me, I might’ve ended up dead. So I never wait too long. It’s safer not to wait.”

Tony has nineteen marks. The national average is five.

He’s met some people with twelve or thirteen, one woman with sixteen--and, like everyone else, he’s read about the babushka in Sokovia who holds the world record with a whopping Guinness-verified eighty-eight. So nineteen really isn’t _that_ many, in the grand scheme of things--nineteen people he’s meant to fold into his life, to hold onto for as long as there’s breath in his body.

He doesn’t flaunt them, a lesson he learned from Howard--a man who’d himself only had two marks, and believed that having any more than that made a person weak and who hadn’t wanted a weak son. Naturally the press assumes that because Tony’s marks are never photographed, they don’t exist. They brand him as soulless, heartless, then try to get him to go on a special season of _The Bachelor_ to find someone to love him despite his deformity. Before he figures out the handy trick of wearing a compression sock on the lower half of his leg and calling it an old injury, he has an even fifty/fifty shot of keeping someone in bed once he’s naked--some people are so thrown off by the dense collection of marks, like scales on a rainbow fish, that they immediately assume either A) he’s fathered nineteen illegitimate children, or B) he’s some sort of polyamorous sexual pervert.

When he’s a kid it seems impossible that he has so many marks. Like some sort of cosmic joke.

In a cave in Afghanistan, having only found four of them, he says to Yinsen, “I don’t understand why the universe gave them to me, if it knows I’ll never get to meet them.”

“Tony,” Yinsen says, chiding. “All this talk of fate--I thought you were a man of science.”

Tony doesn’t answer. He stares at Yinsen across the fire, desperately wanting him to explain. Yinsen must read something like that in his eyes, because he smiles faintly and says, “We are not given soulmarks by magic, you know. It’s biology. Evolution. Like how we are given fingers, and toes, and eyelashes. It’s not part of some greater scheme. No one is out there planning your life. That task falls only to you.”

When Rhodey finds him in the desert, he’s too exhausted to cry. But the tears build up inside him on the flight home, more than twenty hours in the air, so that the second the car door closes and he finds himself in the cool insular calm of the back seat, it all bursts out--painfully, like a pressurized leak suddenly splitting open a concrete dam. Bruce grabs the back of his head and guides Tony’s face into his shoulder and holds him so tight it’s like he’s holding him together, and Pepper rubs a soothing hand up and down his back and murmurs, “You’re alright. We’ve got you, Tony.”

“Ugh,” he shakes himself, when he’s done. “Sheesh. No more crying for _at least_ ten years.”

Pepper presses a salty kiss to the side of his head. “Shut up,” she says. “You’ll be lucky if I’m _done_ crying in ten years.” Judging by the watery look on Bruce’s face, he agrees.

AAA

Trying to figure out what the colors of marks mean is like reading a horoscope.

It’s pseudoscience at best, crackpot astrology at worst. There are thousands of catalogued colors and no patterns to speak of--every theory someone comes up with has so many holes that it barely deserves to be called a theory at all, but still there’s a whole branch of study devoted to it, half anthropology, half biology. Tony never takes any forays into the world of chromanevology himself, but he reads a paper every now and then, just to keep up on the latest.

There are social and historical theories about the marks, as well. Looking back at primary sources--diaries, censuses, letters--it seems that in pre-modern times it was rare to be connected to people outside your immediate geographic location, rare for a Viking shieldmaiden to press her thumb to a soulmark and see someone in Tang dynasty China. From there, it’s easy to make the conclusion that the mechanism of the marks allows, somehow, for the probability of meeting; only, in the 21st century, when transportation can get you from anywhere in the world to anywhere else, that becomes a trickier proposition.

Pepper takes him to a gallery opening once when they’re together--a photographer she likes is showing a series on soulmarks. They’re huge photos, taking up entire walls, and they depict a wide variety of men and women, bodies in the abstract, faces turned away, in black and white except for the rainbow mosaic of their marks, coiled on the pale undersides of forearms, wrapping around necks and faces and through hairlines, cupping flanks and disappearing into stark white underwear, tucked between toes, spread around smiles and nipples and surgery scars like so many drops of ink.

Tony expects to spend the whole evening getting Pepper fresh flutes of champagne and cracking jokes about the other patrons, but he stands in front of the very first image in the entire show--a close up of an old man’s torso, hunched, his soulmarks wrinkled and broken with sunspots and all blue, every one of them blue--and finds himself completely entranced.

_Who do those marks belong to?_ he wonders, and then, _Who loves this man? Who does he love?_ And he trails silently after Pepper through the rest of the gallery and wonders that at each and every piece, and for the first time he feels it building around him like a web, this tappestry of the world that’s so much deeper and richer than he’s ever given it credit for, each person with their own loves and losses, each person with their own little inequities to endure, their own pains and their own balms, their own _histories_.

Tony used to dream about being an island, but maybe it was never about being alone at all. Maybe it was about being afraid to step into the water.

AAA

The first time he sees Steve awake, he nearly falls off the roof.

He _does_ fall off the roof, actually, but he has a couple of junky old repulsors strapped to his feet, so JARVIS catches him before he can go plunging into the pacific. Steve’s mark--a deep black dot on the inside of Tony’s left calf--has always shown him the face of a man frozen in ice. It’s one of those things he’d tried to figure out but never quite could, and so resigned himself to not understanding.

But then one morning he’s on the roof of the Malibu house repairing a busted gamma sensor, hiding from the summer sun in a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses, and he pulls up the cuff of his jeans to scratch his leg and the frozen man’s eyes are _open_. They’re open and they’re the bluest blue Tony’s ever seen, and suddenly without a thick layer of ice between them he recognizes Captain America.

They meet, officially, when Tony charges into SHIELD HQ on a fucking warpath.

He’s in Fury’s office before anyone’s even aware he’s in the building, and he demands that Fury let him take Steve home this instant, since Steve hasn’t been active duty in seventy years and is thus not even sort of the property of the U.S. government. Fury is, as usual, unimpressed by Tony’s theatrics, but he does let Tony take Steve as far as the Starbucks in the lobby--even SHIELD has a Starbucks in the lobby--conditional on him also taking approximately three dozen armed agents.

Tony has lots of noble intentions about taking things slow, easing Steve into the idea that he shares a soulmark with someone who was born thirty years after he crashed a plane into the Arctic, but the moment he sits down with two grande blond roasts that he had to prep himself (since Fury sent all the baristas packing), Steve asks, “You’re Howard’s son, aren’t you? Tony?”

“You knew him,” Tony says. It’s not a question, but Steve takes it like one.

“I knew him during the war,” he recalls, gaze downturned. “But people are...I think we were all different, during the war. So whether I actually knew him, or not...”

“He had your mark,” Tony says, before he can think better of it. “Did you know that?”

Steve shakes his head. “No. No, I never knew that.”

A moment of quiet, and Tony gulps down half his cup of coffee, wishing it were something stronger, because he could really use the liquid fortification to ask, “Do you--“

“I don’t have his mark.” Steve doesn’t sound too torn up about it, more just embarrassed. “He was smart as a whip, and a good man in a storm, but he wasn’t someone I trusted. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I don’t have his mark, either, and he didn’t have me, so. I do have you, though.”

Steve stares at Tony with big, blue eyes.

For a second Tony thinks he’s said too much, too fast, but Steve had looked panicked and desperate when he first came out of the locked door at the other end of the lobby, and Tony had thought of Bruce and _it’s safer not to wait_ , so he can’t bring himself to regret it. He wants Steve to know he has a tether to this world,to this time. Something he can hold onto, use to orient himself, if he needs it.

Steve pushes his chair back and kneels on the ground next to the table. “Uh--“ Tony says, but Steve’s pulling off his shirt to reveal the quilting of soulmarks on his back, ten of them all in a row, and he reaches back and grabs Tony’s hand and contorts to press his thumb to a bright white mark on his shoulder.

Tony’s whole body lights up with that _zing_ of recognition. Steve returns to his chair and puts his shirt back on and steadfastly ignores all the agents gawping at them from strategic points throughout the lobby. “Tony,” he says, voice lowered. “I think you should bust me out of here.”

AAA

They’re biological imperatives, the marks. Protect, trust, defend. _These_ people.

Tony doesn’t really get it when he’s younger--or, he doesn’t think he does, but really he might, because he has no one to protect and no one to protect him so he just does it all himself, assembles thick skin and coping mechanisms and reliable ways of confronting and circumventing his loneliness. DUM-E and U are the first, but even before them he’ll sometimes sit on the counter in the bathroom to do his homework, pretending that his own reflection in the glass is another person, some friend he’s brought home, who wants to hang out with him.

In college he gets over the issue-- _island syndrome,_ as he comes to think of it--by going to lots of parties and having sex with English majors eight years his senior and generally mistaking bodies for people. An easy mistake, and one that a lot of people seemed to make, but Tony had always known, deep down, in a place that came close to the surface right when he was sneaking out of some girl’s bed, that orgasming while he was inside someone would never bring him as close as he felt when he pressed a thumb to his marks and saw the little redhead ballerina, the man in the ice, Rhodey.

He still sometimes feels like did as a kid, curled up on the bathroom counter, lost in that big empty bed in Tokyo. Like nothing and no one in the world is ever going to touch him.

Even at thirty-six, with Bruce and Steve and Rhodey and Pepper, with JARVIS always in his ear whether he’s in the lab or in the air, it’s a hard feeling to shake. It’s like a hard rock of ice lodged in his chest--right next to the arc reactor--that won’t melt, won’t even chip no matter how many times Rhodey shows up to drag his drunk ass home from a party, no matter how many times Bruce steals a cup of coffee out of his hand and forces oolong on him, no matter how often Pepper kisses his cheek fondly in greeting.

Some part of him has never gotten over that period in his life when he felt completely, utterly alone. And he swears there must be something wrong with him, because he looks at happy people on the street, in restaurants, people out with their families and their spouses and their friends, and there’s some small, angry piece of him that resents them. Resents how easy their smiles come, how nothing looks practiced. Because it’s always been hard for him--he’s always had to work at being happy.

_Island syndrome_ , because he’s worried he’s just faking it.

That he doesn’t actually belong with the people the marks have drawn him to, that he’s a mistake, an imposter, and eventually he’ll be rooted out. Eventually he’ll be back on that island, Howard saying, _wait on the balcony, Tony,_ Maria dancing round and round in the kitchen with a bubbling pot of marinara and Cyndi Lauper on the radio, seven soulmarks on her arm the color of fresh tulips and Tony hiding in the hall watching her through the mirror on the wall, wanting. _Wanting_.

AAA

It’s alarming how quickly Steve becomes Tony’s polestar.

Free from the responsibility of being Captain America--free from SHIELD and the U.S. Army and the fight that left him frozen in ice for seventy years, Steve Rogers turns out to be the biggest goofball Tony’s ever met. Granted, he’s a goofball with a right hook that could knock out an elephant, but still. He likes cheese cubes and the Dodgers and movies with bad CGI, he’s earnest as an after school special and twice as corny, he’s killed more men than he can count but he always traps spiders and lets them outside (and sometimes feeds them a snack on the way).

One night not too long after he moves in, Tony finds him out on the back porch at four in the morning, staring out at the dark waters of the pacific with tearstreaks drying on his cheeks. “Three of my marks,” he starts, then stops, swallowing thickly. “Three of my marks don’t do anything when I press them. But there’s one--it should be blank, but when I press it I can still see him...but it’s _not_ him, it’s like--“

He breaks off again with a sob, and Tony swears under his breath and pulls him into a hug, his hands tense and desperate against Steve’s back, because Steve crying is just--he _can’t_. He can’t bear it. Steve drops his head onto Tony’s shoulder and collapses like he’s had his strings cut, and Tony takes the whole superpowered weight of him and holds him for as long as it takes him to cry himself dry, then keeps holding him while he remembers how to breathe, his hands moving unsteadily with the motion of Steve’s shoulders, his neck warm and wet with Steve’s breath.

That morning, as the sun rises and he climbs into bed for his first sleep in days, Tony can’t shake the feeling of Steve’s body against his. Somehow, improbably, across time, this man-- _Captain America--_ has made it here, to Tony, and suddenly the fact that he’s entire rooms away, in his own bedroom down the hall, feels completely unbearable. Tony wants to get up and open Steve’s door and he wants to hold Steve’s face and kiss the tracks of his tears, and-- _fuck_.

“Fuck,” he says, to his empty bedroom.

“Sir?” JARVIS asks.

“Nothing, J.” Tony waves him off, already on his way out of bed. It’s no use trying to sleep when he’s just realized that a week in he’s already half in love with Steve Rogers. “Wake the lab, will you?”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS says, but he somehow manages to sound disapproving while he says it. Figures that Tony would go and build himself an A.I. that can throw shade.

Steve talks Tony into doing any number of things he’d never normally do, chief among them attending a yoga class in Malibu where they run into Pepper and she proceeds to whack him up and down the studio with her rolled up yoga mat because she’s been trying to get him to come to yoga for _years_ and now he just goes and shows up in her morning class? _Unbelievable._ Steve stands behind Tony and tries to pretend he’s not laughing into his hand, and by the end of it all Tony’s so unimaginably sore that he has to lay out in the tiny back seat of the Ferrari while Steve drives home at a speed that’s so slow it is, quite frankly, offensive.

He sets Tony’s nose when it’s broken and does a clumsy waltz with a pool noodle while Tony floats in an inner tube and tells paparazzi looking for snapshots of Iron Man and Captain America out on the town that they should be ashamed of themselves for invading people’s privacy--in a stern _leader of the free world_ sort of voice that disappears the second they’re alone again.

_That task falls only to you_ , Tony hears, and wonders if that applies to love, too. If love is fated or if he can rig it, somehow, to make Steve feel the same way about him. Because he knows it requires something, some trade, maybe--Steve will never love him organically, but there’s nothing in the world that Tony wouldn’t trade to have Steve look at him and _want_ him. All his money, the armor, the arc reactor tech, his house and his cars and his intelligence and his bots and maybe (he feels like an asshole even thinking it) _maybe_ everyone else he’s ever loved.

It’s terrifying, and all-consuming, and Tony feels like a raw nerve whenever he sees Steve in an unguarded moment, just waking up or on his way to bed, sweaty from a run or snorting a little while he laughs or swearing because he touched a hot pan--Steve’s face always touching this bare, flayed piece of his heart that’s way too close to the surface. Tony would trade his life for Steve to love him, only he thinks it would be a shame if he had to, because then he wouldn’t be around to enjoy it.

He knows he’s important to Steve, but as it is he’s one of ten, and a very recent addition. He wishes the marks could tell him this as well: how close is he allowed to get, and what does that closeness look like.

AAA

They build the Avengers mostly by accident.

Tony acquires Bruce at a conference in 2002 and steals Steve from SHIELD in 2011. He becomes Iron Man himself in 2008, but he spends most of the intervening time getting yelled at by various and sundry senate committees during the day and various and sundry soulmates at night.

Natasha introduces herself by stabbing Steve in the chest. Once everyone recognizes each other--her with all three of their marks and all of them with hers--they spend the next twelve hours running around like an unaired episode of the three stooges trying to keep Steve from dying and Natasha’s handlers from killing her and Bruce from turning into a giant green rage monster out of pure unadulterated stress.

When Steve wakes up and finds his would-be assassin sitting at his bedside, her hair greasy and tied back in a braid because she refuses to let her guard down long enough to take a shower but won’t leave his hospital room, instead of yelling like any sane person would do, Steve just croaks, “Hey. It’s you.”

Natasha disappears for half a year, but when she comes back she comes with a grocery bag of each of their favorite ice cream flavors (none of which they’ve told her) and the creepy, utterly certain promise that no one from the Red Room will ever be bothering them again.

They’re not the first of her marks she’s found--she refuses to say anything about her first, other than he was her mentor--but they’re the first, she admits blankly, that she thinks she might be able to keep.

Tony’s the only one with the wizard’s mark, and he finds him in a bodega in the East Village on a very inauspicious, very rainy Monday.

He’s fishing in a basket of japanese candy for something that looks like it might have chocolate in it, wearing a Dodgers cap he stole from Steve and a dark hoodie that makes him all but invisible to the press, and when he finally finds something and turns around, there he is--the wizard, holding a bottle of kombucha and a bag of kale chips, looking like he just swallowed something sour. “Oh _, boo,_ ” he says. “Does it really have to be today?”

About time one of his soulmates is a bitch, Tony thinks.

Out loud he says, “Nice to meet you too, Count Chocula. What is that, a _cape_?”

The wizard rolls his eyes heavenward as if looking for strength and goes to pay for his lunch. The bodega owner doesn’t even bat an eye at his getup. God bless New York.

Tony, who’s been seeing the wizard’s face since they were both snot-nosed brats, through late nights asleep on medical textbooks and manic three-day residency shifts and the stupid face he makes when he orgasms and some sort of strange hermit phase, always sort of expected it would be like this. He doesn’t mind, just trails after the wizard trading barbs and innuendos until eventually they run into an interdimensional threat in a Duane Reade. The wizard sighs and leaves Tony outside holding his kale chips.

Tony’s been watching Peter Parker since the kid was _born_.

He happened to have been touching his mark when it happened--saw Peter open his eyes for the first time, saw him let loose his first ever cry in the world--and from there it wasn’t hard to compile a list of every birth of a caucasian baby boy at every hospital in the world at exactly that second. He kept track of them as they got older, until he could match a face from a kindergarten yearbook, at which point he set up JARVIS to watch him and kept his distance, seeing as billionaire playboy Tony Stark showing up in some random six year old’s life was probably a recipe for disaster.

But then the kid goes and becomes Spider-Man, and he can’t leave him alone anymore.

Him and Steve (because Steve wanders down to the lab while Tony’s doing his stalking and recognizes the kid from one of his own marks) arrive in Queens just in time to stop Peter getting his head blown off by some wannabe supervillain covered in electricity. They bring him back to his aunt’s apartment, incognito in their street clothes and posing as concerned citizens helping a hurt teenager.

The kid has a bloody hole in his leg, but he won’t stop talking the whole time, babbling about how he always figured the marks were a one-way connection, some sort of hero worship thing.

Steve, because he’s a big softie, pulls half his shirt off so Peter can press his thumb to his mark, a small bright orange circle near Steve’s spine. Tony watches the way his face goes slack and awed as he gets confirmation that _he,_ Peter Parker from Queens, is someone that Captain America has always been fated to love--and there in that cramped apartment, a poster of his own face on the wall, he gets hit with an intense shockwave of the fiercest protective instinct he’s ever felt in his life.

Steve must be able to read his damn mind, because on the way out he pulls Tony to a stop in the stairwell. He presses Tony’s shaking hands between his own, and says, “Hey. It’s--“

A woman goes tromping past laden with grocery bags and small children, so of course Steve breaks away and offers to help, and they end up making two trips down to her car and then putting everything away in the kitchen under her stern direction while she breast feeds a teeny tiny baby in the other room, but once they’re done, Steve stops him in the hallway again and says--all in a rush, like he’s been holding it in this whole time: “It’s okay now. We’ve got him, he’s ours, and nothing’s gonna happen to him.”

Tony pulls him into a quick hug, then breaks away before he can start crying. Steve lets him.

AAA

“You never make noise when you’re hurt,” Steve says.

Tony hums absently, not sure where the conversation is going but sure he wants to stop it before it gets there. Steve’s just set his dislocated shoulder--neither of them the types to seek out actual medical attention when they’re perfectly capable of handling it themselves--and Tony’s holding an ice pack to the joint, studiously avoiding Steve’s gaze and waiting for his legs to stop being jelly so he can get down off the table. He doesn’t like having people around when he’s hurt--never has, not even Rhodey.

There’s something about being laid low that makes him tense up for a hit. It’s a large part of why he built JARVIS--he didn’t like having to rely on other people to bring him things when he was sick. He wanted to be able to hide, to lick his wounds in private and emerge back into the world completely whole and completely unassailable, whenever he was good and ready.

“It’s safer,” he admits, offhand, when it’s clear Steve isn’t going anywhere. “That way no one knows I’m anything less than a hundred percent, so they can’t--”

He makes the mistake of meeting Steve’s eyes. He looks like he’s been split in two, painfully. He steps between Tony’s legs and puts one hand on his face, then the other one, his body warm and big and close against the gaping AC chill of the lab, and says, “I’ll never hurt you, Tony. Not in a million years. You don’t have to hide from me.”

“Steve,” Tony murmurs, and can’t think of anything else to say. He can feel Steve’s breath on his face. For a moment he thinks Steve will close the gap, kiss him--and he wants him to, desperately.

Steve drops his hands to Tony’s shoulders, gives him a squeeze, and steps back. Tony feigns a smile. And even though his legs still feel like jelly, he hops down off the table.

It’s dumb for Tony to be sad. He has so many people--more people than he ever thought he’d have, when he was a kid. And he still hasn’t met all of his marks, some of them still silver smoke, a woman with a blue patchwork face and a guy who looks like some sort of douchenozzle country singer and a black girl who’s still in diapers, who he’s keeping an eye on the same way he did with Peter.

He has people he loves, who he knows love him in return--even if no one but Bruce is very good at saying it.

By any measure, he should be happy--and he _is,_ when he can make himself forget that he’s so in love with Steve he wants to die. He has practice with this sort of thing, Tony reminds himself. He’s good at being alone. He’s good at waiting on the balcony, and watching from the hallway.

Sometimes instead of an island he dreams of Afghanistan, and feels the same.

A stranger in a strange land, trapped with no hope of escape and barely any hope of rescue. Maybe that’s where he was meant to be. Maybe that’s why he goes back there when he closes his eyes, back to Yinsen and the car battery and the dry freeze of the desert at night, pressing his thumbs to his marks over and over and wondering what his soulmates saw when they pressed theirs, if they showed his pale haggard face or if they just showed nothing, like he was already dead.

Maybe the universe knew he was never supposed to meet any of them, any of his marks--maybe that’s why it gave them to him. He was meant to be an island. He only cheated fate.

AAA

What tips them over, in the end, is barely anything at all.

Tony gets back to Stark Tower at going on one in the morning. He’d been at a charity gala--a law firm that assisted refugees applying for asylum--but while propping up the bar he’d been approached by a man who looked like the physical manifestation of oatmeal and who dragged him down to SHIELD HQ, where Fury proceeded to try and blackmail him with a sex tape that showed both his bare ass and all nineteen of his marks in living color. Tony had JARVIS delete the footage off their servers, told Fury to go fuck himself--the Avengers would remain an independent entity--and in short order was on his way. 

It was over fast, but it’s left him drained of anything resembling stamina. He pulls his bowtie off in the elevator and is slipping out of his tux jacket as he pads out into the penthouse, tossing everything over the back of the couch, toeing out of his shoes, heading into the kitchen for a much-needed cup of coffee before he heads down to the lab to start working out how Fury got his hands on that tape, and he doesn’t even notice Steve sitting at the counter.

Steve’s reading a book--one of those pulpy romances he likes that has a crinkly cover because he insists on getting all his books from the library--but when Tony comes in he puts his finger on the page and stops reading. “Hey,” he says, softly in accordance with the hour. “How was the shindig?”

Tony knows Steve’s only using the word _shindig_ because he’s playing up the old fashioned schtick, but he’s too tired to play along. Steve’s smiling blue eyes hit him like a brick. His guard is too far down. Everything feels too big inside of him, like something he doesn’t want to say is about to burst out without his permission, and Steve’s sitting there in his home--in _their_ home, looking at him with that teasing half-smile, and he can’t handle it tonight.

“I’m tired, Steve,” he says, turning the coffee maker back off. He’ll use the one in the lab. “Sorry, can we just. I don’t have the energy to be me right now.”

“Tony--“ Steve starts, concerned, but Tony’s already on his way out the door. Steve gets up and catches him before he can disappear, pulling him around. “Hey. Are you okay?”

Tony manages a smile, but even he’s not very convinced. “I’m fine, Steve. Just tired.”

This is where Steve should drop his hand and let Tony go--but not before scrutinizing him for a moment, not before spotting the lie and deciding to let him get away with it.

Instead, he moves his hand to Tony’s waist and grabs him tighter, keeping him there. Tony’s had to stop himself from imagining this a million times, had to carefully think around the way dim light hits the filament gold of Steve’s eyelashes and how it would feel to come home after a long day and put all his weight on someone who loves him, someone who doesn’t care if he stops being Tony Stark for a while, if he lets himself fall apart into component pieces. A beating heart and a blue glow and words that aren’t funny at all.

“I want to be tired with you,” Steve tells him. His voice is low, and even, but it still sounds like he’s making a confession. “You don’t have to be anything. I just...right now, I want to be with you.”

Tony makes a sound in the back of his throat. A hurt sound.

Steve takes a breath like he’s about to jump into water, leans in, and kisses him.

Tony jerks back for a second. It’s like an electric jolt has gone through him, and he needs a minute to stop feeling like he’s going to shake apart at the seams the instant Steve touches him. The warmth of his skin, the taste of the inside of his mouth, the huge space he’s taking up in Tony’s awareness, in the doorway, in the aching muscle of Tony’s heart--he needs a minute to acclimatize. Steve lets him, waiting patiently with his forehead resting against Tony’s, his hands on Tony’s waist, his eyes trained, lidded and intent, on Tony’s lips. If he made him stand here for a century, he thinks Steve would wait, just like this.

He doesn’t make him wait. He wraps his arms around Steve’s neck and kisses him again, harder, with the sort of intent that he hopes communicates total conviction.

AAA

Tony, age forty, dreams of sinking in the ocean.

It’s a peaceful dream. He can always breathe, somehow, as he slips away from the sunlight and sinks deeper and deeper, the pressure never increasing, fear and panic never coming. All he feels is a strange sort of weightlessness, the insular serenity of being both completely alone and completely surrounded. Sometimes he can sense other people around him in the dark, eyes on him and hands reaching for him, but even that’s peaceful. The calm is constant. And he just drifts, and drifts, and drifts.

He washes up on the shore of awareness and sees Steve in bed next to him--the same way he’s woken up a thousand times--and as he traces his features with sleep-crusted eyes he hears, _That task falls only to you,_ and for the first time in his life it’s a comfort.

Tony smiles so wide his face hurts, and when Steve wakes up he’s still smiling, looking like a madman. Steve demands to know what the joke is, Tony insists it’s nothing, and Steve--maybe believing him but still wanting to carry out his diabolical plan--slides down under the covers and laves wet kisses up and down Tony’s leg, skimming his laughing mouth over nineteen soulmarks until he finds his own.

A jolt of recognition shudders up Tony’s leg, like a live wire running straight to that tight icy block in his chest.

Steve must feel something happening to Tony’s body because he keeps kissing that same spot, digging his teeth in gently, over and over, while the ice starts to melt and Tony fists his hands in his own hair and feels like Steve’s hands are on the inside of his ribcage, like they’re reaching back through that mirror and onto that balcony and pulling him out of the past and into a future where he never has to be alone and he starts to beg, tears in his eyes, _don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t ever stop._

Steve, to his eternal credit, never does.


End file.
